Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a coding scheme that encodes video into a sequence of pictures with the highest image quality while ensuring that part of the encoded picture sequence (specifically, a partial sequence of frames intermittently selected from the total sequence of frames) can be decoded and used to represent the video with a low image quality.
Although it is possible to represent low image-quality video by receiving and processing part of a sequence of pictures encoded according to a scalable coding scheme, there is still a problem in that the image quality is significantly reduced if the bitrate is lowered. One solution to this problem is to provide an auxiliary picture sequence for low bitrates, for example, a sequence of pictures that have a small screen size and/or a low frame rate.
The auxiliary picture sequence is referred to as a base layer, and the main picture sequence is referred to as an enhanced layer. When it is used in a decoder, the main picture sequence is also referred to as a current layer to be decoded based on the base layer. When the base layer is provided, inter-layer prediction is performed to increase coding efficiency.
The SVC can be used in combination with an MPEG-4 video codec or an MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec (AVC), which is also referred to as “H.264”. To adaptively apply binary arithmetic coding, which is an entropy coding scheme, according to adjacent coding information, there is a need to define a method for encoding or decoding coding data (for example, syntax information) of the video codec.